By Morin Bishop, Womrath Bookshop

Jan. 19, 2022: Here in Womrath’s, we are enthusiastic fans of novelist Amor Towles. Gentleman in Moscow, his enchanting tale of a Russian aristocrat sentenced to spend the remainder of his days in an elegant hotel in Moscow, has sold more than 400 copies in our store since its original publication in 2016, including 12 during this past December, an astonishing total for a book more than five years old.

So it was with breathless anticipation that we welcomed Towles’s third novel, The Lincoln Highway, when it arrived this past October, in perfect time for the Christmas rush. My first reaction after pulling the book from its box was to balk at its length of more than 500 pages, worried that some readers might find it too daunting. But soon thereafter I sunk into my comfy couch at home and began reading. And reading, And reading. Three days later, I was done and wishing that Towles had given us another 500 pages. To resort to a tired cliché—literally accurate in this case—I simply could not put the book down, so mesmerized was I by the inventive storytelling and the collection of colorful and highly sympathetic characters that populate its pages in abundance.

The primary protagonists are 18-year-old Emmett Watson and his eight-year brother Billy, wise and resourceful both, whose planned journey across 1950s America, from their bankrupt family farm in Nebraska to the golden promise of California, is repeatedly waylaid, forced over a frantic and action-packed 10 days to head in the opposite direction, by car and most memorably by train, to New York City. Two fellow inmates from the juvenile work farm that Emmet leaves at the beginning of the novel—one devious and wily, the other wonderfully innocent and naïve—are frequently the source of the plot’s many peregrinations, but a motley crew of other characters keep the reader endlessly entertained, including an itinerant preacher, a veteran of World War II and seasoned train-hopper named Ulysses—shades of Homer and Joyce both—a feisty Nebraska neighbor named Sally, and the author of young Billy’s beloved big red compendium of 26 heroes and adventurers from history and legend (from Achilles to Zorro), who the two brothers discover holed up in an office in the Empire State Building.

A stirring tribute to the power of story, with unmistakable allusions to Huckleberry Finn and the Odyssey both, The Lincoln Highway is destined to become a classic that will be read for decades to come. Writing in the New York Times, Chris Bachelder describes the novel as “remarkably brisk, remarkably buoyant. Though dark shadows fall across its final chapters, the book is permeated with light, wit, youth. Many novels this size are telescopes, but this big book is a microscope, focused on a small sample of a vast whole. Towles has snipped off a minuscule strand of existence—10 wayward days—and when we look through his lens we see that this brief interstice teems with stories, grand as legends.” I liked Gentleman in Moscow very much; this one I adored. Come on in and grab a copy for yourself.